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SUMMARY OF MODIFICATIONS FOR V5.4 LEVEL 20

Large Disk Support All FDR programs have been updated to support "large disks" (up to 32760 cylinders in size). Most reports will identify disks larger than a 3390-9 as a "3390-27" (for 27GB capacity) The FASTCPK recovery log has been enhanced to handle a larger number of relocated tracks, enabling it to support large disks and 3390-9 disks without special processing or multiple executions.
FDREPORT There are many enhancements to FDREPORT:
  • FDREPORT can now access and report on offline disk volumes. Offline volumes may be used with point-in-time backups (such as FDRINSTANT) or with other special volume replication functions (PPRC, SRDF, BCVs, ShadowImage, FlashCopy, Snapshot, etc.).

  • The new option FASTPATH (ENABLE=FASTPATH) significantly reduces the overhead of allocating and opening disk volumes, improving FDREPORT efficiency when processing large numbers of disk volumes. FASTPATH can reduce FDREPORT execution time from 25-75% when processing many disk volumes, depending on the type of report you have requested. FASTPATH is required when reporting on offline volumes

  • The aliases of a catalog or dataset can be listed

  • In a volume report, volumes can be selected or excluded based on their capacity in cylinders

  • Large disks (up to 32760 cylinders) are supported. But, since the size of the devices forces some fields to expand in size and changes the report format, the support must be enabled with ENABLE=LARGEDISK

  • A variety of new report and selection fields are supported.
  • RTC=YES Innovation strongly recommends adding RTC=YES to all FDR, FDRDSF, and FDRABR DUMP statements.

    RTC=YES provides these advantages:

  • Disk and tape buffers are moved above-the-line, allowing more backups to run concurrently in a single FDR or ABR step

  • The Read Track CCW is used to read disk data

  • In many cases, RTC=YES will provide a noticeable reduction in backup elapsed time compared to the default of RTC=NO. This reduction is more pronounced when FICON channels to the disk and tape are used.
    (Note that RTC=YES does not support software compression [COMPRESS= is ignored if specified].)

  • If you are dumping to a disk dataset (such as ABR Archive TAPEx on disk), RTC=YES will usually take more disk space but less elapsed time.
  • MULTI-VOLUME VSAM RESTORE FDRDSF, FDRCOPY and FDRABR have been enhanced to improve the likelihood of success when restoring or copying multi-volume VSAM clusters. Multi-volume VSAM must be restored or copied to the same number of volumes as the original cluster, and it must have the same number and size of extents on each volume as the original cluster. In previous releases, FDR would choose an output volume with sufficient space to hold the first extent of a cluster, but might then fail getting the additional extents because of insufficient or fragmented free space. This would lead to a failure of the restore, requiring manual intervention to cleanup and restore. The most common error message for this condition was:
    (FDR157** VSAM ALLOCATION ERROR COMP=9096 CODE=03129 VOL=volser CLUSTER=cluster Now, FDR will continue searching the available output volumes (NVOL=) for a volume with sufficient space to allocate that piece of the cluster. As long as volumes are available in the NVOL list with sufficient free space (and size) to handle the extents of the cluster, the restore/copy should be successful.)
    ARCHIVE CONTROL FILE SIZE The Archive Control File (ACF) can now contain records for up to 5,701,632 datasets or VSAM components.
    FDRREORG FDRREORG has been updated to handle all currently supported types of IAM and VSAM datasets. The CONVERTINDEX operand can be used convert VSAM files which were originally allocated with IMBED or REPLICATE to NOIMBED and NOREPLICATE since IBM no longer recommends those options
    EMC CONCURRENT BCV SUPPORT FDRINSTANT for EMC now supports Concurrent BCVs, a new feature in Timefinder which allows 2 BCVs to be connected to the same standard volume at once. FDRINSTANT can SPLIT and REESTABLISH either BCV.
    (Details are in Section 25.)
    Also, FDRINSTANT now uses EMC Instant Split as a default.
    FDREPORT UNDER ABR FDREPORT can now be dynamically invoked under FDRABR, to create a database of information about the datasets which were backed up or archived by ABR. The operand PRINT=RPT on the ABR DUMP statement, invokes this new function. The ABR JCL must also contain a DD statement $RPTSUT2 pointing to a sequential disk dataset, which will become a database of the selected datasets. After each volume is dumped, FDREPORT will add a data record for each disk dataset selected from the volume by ABR, in the FDREPORT "compressed data" format (RPTYPE=COMPDATA) with a selection of fields describing the dataset and its backup.
    (You can later use FDREPORT to generate reports from this database, or you can use FDREPORT to generate SELECT statements that can be input to an ABR restore step. Details are in section 54 "FDREPORT", and also in Section 80.20 "Disaster Recovery".)

    E-MAIL NOTIFICATION You have the option of sending e-mail messages when a FDR, FDRDSF, FDRCOPY or FDRABR operation is unsuccessful (and if you like, for successful operations as well). An optional FDREMAIL DD statement in a FDR step will invoke the facility; it points to control statements defining the message and its recipients. A mail server that supports SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) is required. Messages can also be sent to alpha-numeric pagers and cell phones.
    (Details are in Section 80.16.)